Opening night is incredible – absolutely difficult to describe.
You’ve done all that work in tech week so your adrenaline and
excitement builds and builds and builds, then you have the first
night which we knew was completely sold out. My memory from doing
The Merchant of Venice was that first previews here are slightly
bonkers because the audience that come are the same crowd that come
to every first preview. They are a particular audience who love
that opening excitement. So before we first went on Dominic
[Dromgoole, director] described to us that the audience was going
to be a bit like a lot of 8 year old children who have had too much
sugar!

I knew opening night would be the warmest audience; they are up
for having fun and really support what we’ve created, even if it
all goes horribly wrong! It was amazing because a lot of my stuff
is bawdy comedy, and it just went down a storm in a way that I
didn’t quite expect. For example, in my first scene I’m … well, I’m
having a slash against the side wall and I turn around to Romeo and
tell him he needs to come to the party. I’ve always had my flies
undone for that bit, it was a bit of a joke which I’d always done
in rehearsal. Then on opening night, because I hadn’t quite worked
out my costume, my trousers completely fell down and I though
‘Brilliant – that’ll do.’ So I just kept them down, walked forward
and let the audience see it. That was a discovery in the moment and
I kept that in.

The Audience

The play is full of moments when you do something and the
reaction from the audience suddenly excites you and inspires you to
play with it or to play with the audience as much as you can. The
most exciting thing, and the most difficult, is working out how
much to use the audience. So when I was last here playing Bassanio
I had a very open relationship with the audience. I was very free
and I used to do a lot of stuff with them. In particular speeches I
would use particular members of the audience.

I was looking forward to doing that again, but discovered in the
first few performances here that, although there are moments where
I open out, a lot of Mercutio’s stuff is happening internally. His
melancholy, his depression and his frustration make me very inward.
After a few shows, Dominic [Dromgoole, director] said to me that I
needed to give 30% or 40% more out to the audience if I could.
That’s been really exciting to play with because it was very hard
to begin with. But then as soon as I opened out to invite people in
from the upper gallery and the groundlings, to include them in his
wit and his language I was actually losing some of his own
selfishness that I had discovered. It suddenly felt very difficult
to marry his inward quality that was quite useful in rehearsal with
the giving out of his language and his personality.

Having said that, the Globe encourages it and you get so much
back from that relationship with the audience if you open yourself
up to it, so it’s been really exciting. I’ve found a way of making
them part of his world, and part of his insecurities without losing
anything. So it’s been a fantastic, exciting thing to play with but
it hasn’t been as easy as I imagined it would be because of who
Mercutio is. It took me a while to equal the balance to the point
where I could include them but not lose what I’d worked on in
rehearsal.

Interacting

There are moments in rehearsal when we’ll say, “This is the
point where we walk through the yard, through the audience and come
out the other side” which you can’t really rehearse until you’ve
got the audience, so then you just launch yourself into it. The
first time we did that bit we almost got completely lost – you
don’t realise how full it is (and most people are much taller than
I am)! We had to head from one side of the stage to the other. You
get mid-way through and think “I don’t know where we are anymore!”
We just couldn’t get our act together and we were almost late for
our entrance. You have to realise those things and re-work them
during preview week.

Now I’ve just started to talk all the way around which is
probably terrible, maybe I shouldn’t do it but I just chat to the
audience as I’m walking through because we are kind of drunk
anyway. I say things like, “We’re lost! Where are we?” I tell
Benvolio off for touching people. Then if I see groups of girls I
try and invite them to the party. Just little things like that make
that journey more than a bunch of actors walking from one side of
the stage to the other. The audience are there, so you might as
well include them. It makes a scene in itself. The whole journey
suddenly becomes really helpful to get us in the mood for the party
and also to create the reality of that journey which is what they
do in the play but you don’t often see it.

Changes

We still had rehearsals during previews. The director is
watching every single show in the evenings and he takes notes and
we are given the notes the next day, then he’ll choose particular
sections that he wants to look at and tweak.

I think the bulk of changes that were made were about rhythm and
speed and clarity and energy of thought. The Globe itself – this is
what Dominic says – is a space that embraces intelligence of wit
and speed, mischievousness, cheekiness and naughtiness. If you
embrace the speed of these characters’ thoughts, actually the
audience get far more than if you try to labour things or try to
explain things to them. We were encouraged to trust that if we keep
those trains of thought alive, fast and intelligent then the
audience will come with us. Not only will we knock time off the
show, but we will actually improve the audiences’ experience. So
that was very useful because Mercutio is like that – he can just
turn on a dime in an instant and launch into a whole other realm of
thought. So it is really helpful to be told to trust that I can do
that at speed and the audience won’t lose anything.

I would very much like to think the play will change, I think
the best thing about this theatre, is that it kind of ‘gives back’
- the Globe itself and the audience give back whatever you give
them. So if you give them playfulness they can see in your eyes
that you are enjoying your experience on the stage, and they take
that on board. Scenes can change and alter and so their reactions
can change and alter. That encourages you to keep it fresh and keep
playing around with it, and Mercutio is so like that anyway so he
never stops playing. I have great scope to keep it naughty which I
am striving to do, to keep things alive, try to keep blocking
fluidly not always be in the same spaces on the same lines, saying
them in the same way. So the Queen Mab speech has been a moveable
feast; I just go with my instincts a little bit and connect with
people in the audience; sometimes that will be helpful and
sometimes its not. You have good ideas and bad ideas.

Good idea …

There are moments in rehearsal when we’ll say, “This is the
point where we walk through the yard, through the audience and come
out the other side” which you can’t really rehearse until you’ve
got the audience, so then you just launch yourself into it. The
first time we did that bit we almost got completely lost – you
don’t realise how full it is (and most people are much taller than
I am)! We had to head from one side of the stage to the other. You
get mid-way through and think “I don’t know where we are anymore!”
We just couldn’t get our act together and we were almost late for
our entrance. You have to realise those things and re-work them
during preview week.

Now I’ve just started to talk all the way around which is
probably terrible, maybe I shouldn’t do it but I just chat to the
audience as I’m walking through because we are kind of drunk
anyway. I say things like, “We’re lost! Where are we?” I tell
Benvolio off for touching people. Then if I see groups of girls I
try and invite them to the party. Just little things like that make
that journey more than a bunch of actors walking from one side of
the stage to the other. The audience are there, so you might as
well include them. It makes a scene in itself. The whole journey
suddenly becomes really helpful to get us in the mood for the party
and also to create the reality of that journey which is what they
do in the play but you don’t often see it.

… Bad idea

The other day for the first time I found myself really down at
the front of the stage and I was saying the line in the Queen Mab
speech about how “she come with the tithe- pig’s tail tickling a
parson’s nose” (1.4.79-80). There was somebody’s nose right in
front of me, so I pretended to tickle it in front of the
groundlings, and instantly my brain just kind of went “No that was
a bad idea! A bad idea! Abort! Abort! Abort!” I don’t know why I
felt so uncomfortable about doing it, but something about my
commitment to it didn’t quite pull it off. It came as an instant
idea so I tried it out, it didn’t quite satisfy what I wanted from
it, so I realised that maybe that wasn’t the right line to do that,
or maybe connecting with the audience in a speech that is exploring
such a self-created world is not appropriate – it breaks that
rhythm and that poetic through line he has created. Some things
work and some things don’t, but it’s exciting to be able to have
the option to get things wrong.

Press Night

I hate press nights! I shouldn’t say that but I think press
nights are just horrible. I don’t know how to describe it. The
audiences are lovely but I think what it does to my actor’s brain
is not very helpful. The best performances here are the ones when
you feel free and playful and cheeky and mischievous, which this
place embraces. There is nothing to impede one’s playfulness more
than knowing you’re being judged from the audience, which is what
press nights are all about. So I felt quite impeded I suppose,
which made me feel like it wasn’t the greatest show in the world.
But the good thing is that if your rehearsals have built a strong
core, a strong base of performance as a company, then even if you
feel terrible everything is still there regardless of how you feel
about it.

The more shows we’ve done the more I’ve realised that actually
when I think it’s gone really badly, you speak to people and they
say “No, that was better than before.” You realise that your own
little third eye that judges yourself isn’t very reliable, which is
good to feel because then you just have to trust and have fun. As
well as the press we had amazing people in the audience from the
building who were really supportive, so the atmosphere was great
and everyone was really pleased. It felt very much like we had to
get it over with. I feel like that anyway – that you have to get
press nights over with and then you can really fly.

Reviews

I try not to read reviews, but my mum likes to thrust the
reviews in my face, and she’s been letting me know that they have
been good generally, which is nice. The good thing about the Globe
is that you get so much more response from the audience themselves
than you do in a normal theatre. Actually something about the space
makes people feel like they get to know you a bit better because
you connect with them more. By the end of seeing a show here they
have formed a relationship and feel like they know you, so after
the show you get lots of people coming up to you saying well done.
Those people are the ones who are the most exciting to talk to
because they say things like “I hated Shakespeare but seeing the
show has made me realise that it is actually really fun”, or “I’ve
never understood the Queen Mab speech before and suddenly I
understood it for the first time”. Things like that really make you
feel great and fulfil what it is we are doing, so actually the
reviews to me are kind of immaterial, but I’m sure to the rest of
the building they are very important. But it’s nice to know that
actually you’ve got a good show and people enjoy it.

It makes people think of Shakespeare in a different way … people
don’t realise it’s so rude! My parents came on the second preview,
and the first thing my mum said to me was “You are so rude!” It’s
my character – he’s filthy and a few of the reviewers have
mentioned the bawdiness and the fact that it works in relief to the
love that Romeo and Juliet have, in the same way that Romeo and
Mercutio work in relief to each other. You have these two polar
opposites: ideas of what love and lust are, and they work really
well against each other. I think our production really brings that
out and the Globe audience bring that out, it’s what is in their
heads that makes the bawdiness work. Nothing to do with me at
all!

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the
part as s / he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply
his / her own interpretations and frequently change as the
rehearsals progress.

Tech week is one of the most important weeks in the whole
rehearsal period. It’s where you take your show that’s been created
in a rehearsal room and has been finished for that environment to
the whole brand new environment of the theatre.

The Globe itself is one of the most incredibly inspiring
environments to tech a show in because there’s no real tech stuff
for it! In a typical theatre, you go in and you have all the
lighting cues and the sound cues, and all the massive set changes
have to be choreographed and worked out, whereas here it is much
more about the entrances and exits, and costume changes and fitting
in with the music and the singing.

Changes to the play

During the tech week, the focus on the play is very, very
different. Dominic [Dromgoole, director] is still there all the way
through, but his concern is very much with piecing it all together
physically and technically, getting it all right. So you start to
get used to how blocking on the stage works and how your lines
sound; suddenly a move that you made in rehearsal doesn’t quite
feel right, so instead of going around a pillar on the outside, you
might come on the inside. Little things like that change, but it’s
a self-policing rehearsal period. Although you are not officially
rehearsing scenes line-by-line with Dominic, everybody in their own
little bubbles is still rehearsing, still working.

Obviously the sound in the rehearsal room is very different. We
had a very tight, slightly claustrophobic rehearsal room, and in a
way we suited our performances to that. Suddenly you’ve got this
vast expanse of wood and sky to play to, so you have to pull on
different inspirations. But it suits the play, so it helps you
towards what it should be.

Performing previously at the Globe

I knew a little bit in my head what I was going to expect from
having been here in 2007 for The Merchant of Venice, when I played
Bassanio. But I’m playing such a different part than I was last
time and the play is so different, it’s still a fresh journey to
try and piece together this character, in this play, in this space,
this time around, as opposed to the character I was playing last
time. It’s never dull to walk out on that stage however many times
you perform on it. It always fills you with a rush of inspiration
and excitement and history: all that comes washing over you when
you walk out on stage, it’s fantastic.

There was a moment when Adetomiwa [Edun, Romeo] came out on
stage during tech week – he had been so busy in the first weeks, he
had missed the group sessions that we had had on the stage already
– and I saw his face just come alive as he said “This is amazing;
this is incredible’. We’d forgotten he hadn’t had that experience
previously, so it was fantastic to see him react like that, because
obviously you forget sometimes how exciting it is.

Anticipating the audience

Being here is quite unusual in terms of lack of privacy. Doing
the tech somewhere else, it is usually very private – whereas here
you’ve got tour groups coming through all the time! It means you
have a chance to get used to the idea of having people there, and
being able to see people’s faces, and these tour groups react
sometimes, so you get a chance to gauge things a little.

Once in the tech, it got to the scene where Benvolio and I come
on after the party and we try to ‘conjure’ Romeo to appear. At that
point Mercutio uses lots of rude language and so I do a lot of
aggressive sexual miming. I did it in the tech, and there was a
tour group who were seated right in front of me, dead centre, made
up of families with young children! They were the only ones in
there, but I had to do it, because we had to tech it, so I did it –
they had looks of complete horror on their faces as I was
aggressively waggling my tongue at them!. It was so embarrassing
but a nice wake-up call – the audience aren’t always going to jump
at something you find funny. Tech week is great for getting used to
all of those things, and then the big change obviously comes when
the audiences are let in properly!

Costume

Tech week is your first taste of working in costume which is
both very disorientating and also quite exciting. You’re wearing
brand new Elizabethan shoes stockings and all hand-made garments. I
had a costume fitting a while ago and met the lady who is making my
costume (by hand!). She came in with a base template, then using me
as a model, defined it more so that she could go away and finish it
off. Mercutio’s costume is a melting pot of all kinds of fabrics
and colours – it’s crazy, but fantastic. The sleeves are bright
yellow and black, the torso bit is pale blue with gold lining, then
the trousers are two layers: a bright yellow layer underneath and
then a top layer of maroon leather slashed so that the colour comes
through.

During tech week, the designers are always watching and are
constantly seeing what people look like and adjusting the length or
tightening things. I love my costume, but during tech, it felt like
something didn’t quite match what I’d been rehearsing, or my idea
of the character. We realised that it all looked a bit too clean
and a bit too smart – beautifully fitted and everything looking
immaculate. It just felt wrong, because I create this mucky and
slightly disheveled Mercutio. So, in conjunction with Dominic and
the designer, we decided that it needed to be broken down a
bit.

So I saw them take my costume off in one of the breaks: they
were covering it in mud and pulling out some of the stitching. I
wear it very loosely, with a lot of it undone so it’s hanging loose
and it gradually started to meet my vision of what the person
should be like. It’s a kind of work in progress and you can adjust
things like that in the tech and make it your own … even with
expensive costumes and looks of horror from the costume department!
These people have spent months creating them and obviously they’re
not cheap, but if it doesn’t serve the play then it doesn’t serve a
purpose, so it would be wrong to try to sandwich my performance
into that costume. As each week goes on, hopefully it will get more
and more broken down – it’ll get covered in blood and dirt, I’ll be
rolling around in puddles when it rains. I love all that! I keep
saying to the wardrobe department, “Don’t clean it, don’t clean
it!” So that’s the idea of Mercutio – he’s from noble birth, he’s
got a lot of money yet he spends most of his time rolling around in
mud and doesn’t really care about the look of himself.

You feel different in costume, particularly internally, but
what’s also amazing is coming out onstage and suddenly seeing the
other people in your scenes in the full Elizabethan garb; this
whole world is created in front of you with the costumes and that
helps trigger the imagination. It’s a joy to watch people’s
characters be reborn on the stage now that they have got their
costumes on. It gives you a little extra shove towards the finished
product.

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the
part as he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his
own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsals
progress.

After I steal Lady Capulet away from Tybalt (which in some ways
sets that story in motion) the music slows right down whilst Romeo
and Juliet see each other for the first time and compose their
sonnet. We’re all still in the background and I’m dancing with one
of the girl extras. We’re doing really slow, controlled movement
for that dance and at first it didn’t feel quite right for
Mercutio. I thought he wouldn’t be comfortable being so contained,
but I’ve decided that he suddenly gets drawn in and falls
completely in love with dancing. It takes him over and he discovers
how lonely and incredibly sad he is and how much he wants to have
somebody other than just his own brain, so actually it became quite
useful. I also dance at the end of the play in the jig. We’re
actually going to be moving and singing at the same time, which
sends most of us crazy, but it should be fun. There is so much good
singing, the songs that have been written for this play are just
gorgeous, so the more we can do at the end, the better.

Interacting Onstage

The most useful thing recently has been working with Jack
[Farthing] who is playing Benvolio. Our characters have a lot of
scenes together and the more we rehearse, the more trust is built
and the easier it will be onstage, because obviously the characters
are old friends. At this point in their history, Romeo has
separated himself, so having that relationship with Benvolio has
helped those scenes come to life. Dominic has just introduced the
idea of the importance of talking to each other: anything your
character is saying onstage is always communicating to someone else
onstage, or to the audience. You can’t just exist in your own
bubble, no matter how well worked out it is or how much you’ve
thought it through. In the Globe space it’s got to be all about who
you’re telling it to. You take the work you do on your own and
bring it to the room, which is why working with Jack has been so
fantastic. We’ve discovered so much simply by opening up what we’ve
both worked on, forming a friendship and making that Mercutio and
Benvolio communicating. Although Mercutio is incredibly lonely and
can entertain himself for hours riffing about various things, the
speeches have to be linked to various people onstage, or the
audience. It can’t just be for your own pleasure – that’s not fun
to watch and it doesn’t tell the story properly. So that’s been a
nice discovery.

Fight rehearsals

Fight rehearsals have come on leaps and bounds – they’re so much
fun! We’ve been working on the fights and then the scenes in
complete isolation, but what has happened this week is bringing
those together, which is not easy. The temptation when you’re
working on the fight cold is that you mark it through and you get
the rhythm, whereas once it comes out of the engine of the scene
itself, it gets quite fast and it becomes quite crazy. We want to
get it right and make it emotionally real, so we’ve had a few near
misses and cuts and bangs and things like that as a result, but
it’s getting there. The first time we did it in front of the rest
of the cast was great; their reactions were horrified! That fight
scene is when the play takes a dark turn, so it’s amazing doing it
in a run. Romeo and Juliet get married in the scene before, so
there is this beautiful innocence in the room and a lovely light
atmosphere and then at the back, all of us lads are getting our
swords on, ready to ruin everything. All these fights were so
violent and nasty, and watching people kick and hurt each other
really does change the atmosphere of the whole play. It’s not just
a bit of fighting that we know the audience will like, it actually
has a great effect on the story, and of course that’s when
Mercutio’s story ends. The fight itself is knackering! I have to do
my big dying speech afterwards, but I’m a little bit unfit so I do
the fight (which lasts a few minutes) and I’m just so tense and
completely out of breath! Although, I’m trying to use that lack of
breath to show somebody passing away, so maybe feeling like that
does kind of help portray the injury at the end … I guess it could
be helpful!

Placing Blame

The fight totally changes the mood of all the other characters
and the sad thing is, Mercutio never finds out about Juliet.
Mercutio never finds out where Romeo has been and dies thinking
Romeo is still doting after Rosaline. Actually, if Mercutio hadn’t
fought Tybalt maybe it wouldn’t have ended in the same way. There’s
a point where Tybalt comes in and threatens Romeo but Romeo doesn’t
want to fight; Tybalt is about to leave and that could have been
the end of it, but Mercutio steps in and demands a fight. Mercutio
is slain, Romeo seeks revenge and then he is completely screwed,
whereas if that scene had ended without the fight, Romeo and Juliet
probably would have gone off, got married, sorted out the feud and
everything would have been fine. Mercutio has got a lot to answer
for in terms of the tragedy.

Anticipating Tech Week

We’ve got our final run-through today in the rehearsal room and
then we have a week getting used to costumes, the space, music
cues, entrances and exits, props and I can’t wait. I can’t wait to
get in there and take the work we’ve got in here which I think is
really strong, on everyone’s part. It’s a fantastic place to be in
for that mad, exciting journey through working on the stage. It
should be really fun.

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the
part as he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his
own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsals
progress.

This week we were working back through the play for the second
or even the third time, going back to the beginning and working on
stuff that wasn’t quite clear, or finding and discovering new
things, or fine-tuning what we’d discovered first time round. I was
far happier this time. First time is always a bit of a minefield;
you have all these ideas and either they don’t quite work, or if
they do, you’re not quite sure how they fit in with the rest of the
play. When you’ve been through once, it becomes slightly easier to
piece it all together and you have more of a sense of the whole of
the character and their journey.

Whenever you’re rehearsing any part, it takes a while before you
find the hook, a way in for you to discover how to be the
character. I think I’ve got more of a grasp on Mercutio now and am
discovering things along the way. We open two weeks on Thursday, so
time has just vanished! I’m really looking forward to running the
entire play though, because we’ve been working in such isolation;
my scenes are all with Tybalt, Benvolio and Romeo, so I haven’t
seen any of Juliet’s scenes, or the Capulet world, so it will be
lovely to start linking things together to get a flow.

There is quite a split between the man Mercutio would like to be
and feels happiest being, and the one he has to be most of the time
who is feels slightly alienated from everyone else. Through
sessions with and Jan [Haydn-Rowles, voice] and Glyn [MacDonald,
movement], I’ve been discovering, not just the psychological
differences but also how to express that best.

More Voice Work

My recent voice session with Jan was great. We talked about
Jan’s behaviour theory about dog and cat people. As Philip, I am
naturally a very dog-like person. Dog-people let other people know
how they feel all the time; for example, in a conversation they
“umm” and “aah” along the way and use lots of nodding, to
constantly let people know how they feel, that they’re safe.

But cat-people are far more reserved and private; you don’t
necessarily know what they’re thinking all the time. We decided
that Mercutio is definitely a cat-person. He doesn’t make the
effort to let people know what he’s feeling. He is quite happy to
be in his own world, to not care what other people are thinking,
not care what they think he might be thinking. A situation or a
conversation might come out, but only when he chooses. So that was
quite interesting.

Movement Work

Glynn is a wonderful woman. The session itself was an Alexander
session, which is all about posture. So you go and it’s about being
made aware of how to use your body and lengthen the spine, because
it affects voice and movement. It’s so important to be in tune with
your body and your voice on the Globe stage.

It was actually through a discussion with Glynn that I
discovered the idea of Mercutio’s split personality, and through
the movement, I want to discover his contradictions. Glynn had this
idea of ‘twisting’, that when he chooses to be alert to something,
or he chooses to grab hold of an idea, he suddenly has an amazing
quickness that is not evident in his character most of the time.
We’ve found that his mode, or his rhythm changes. When he’s just
dealing with everyday things, he is one man with a very slightly
stilted movement, and his energy seems to be drawn much more from
the ground. But when he chooses to, he can just switch and turn and
twist his energy levels upward.

To explore this idea, Glynn took me through a few exercises so I
can take that idea into the rehearsal room. We also talked about
other actors who have worked here, who maybe captured something
similar, like Mark Rylance, when he played Hamlet in 2000. I didn’t
see it, but I heard how amazing it was. He managed to make
incredibly famous speeches feel like he was just making them up as
he went along, which is what I wanted to capture with Mercutio. It
is so clever if you think someone is pulling images and stories
from thin air, not just reciting a speech.

I’ve been having difficulty with my own energy. When I worked
here before, my energy was very much outward; I bounced around the
stage, running everywhere, to give everyone my focus. Whereas I
don’t think I can do that for Mercutio – he is far more selfish. He
lets other people come to him and he draws the audience in to him.
So I’m trying to trust that that is possible, that you don’t have
to force anything as long as you’re keyed in to the imagery and the
psychology of who you are. Hopefully I’ll be able to bring the
atmosphere in the audience in, but at the moment it feels quite far
away.

Mercutio’s Death: Choreographing the Fatal
Fight

We’re trying to find a fresh way of telling that very famous
story and make it more exciting to perform. The convention of
Mercutio’s death is:

- Mercutio and Tybalt exchange words;
- they fight;
- Romeo warns that the Prince has forbidden it and gets in between
to break up the fight;
- Mercutio is famously hurt underneath Romeo’s arm, stabbed by
Tybalt.

We wanted to try something a bit different and to make this
moment as exciting as possible, because people know this play so
well. So we have Romeo involved in the fight earlier on, trying to
stop us. There’s a point right at the beginning where Romeo disarms
me, so I immediately take his sword and throw him out of the way to
get back into the fight. At one point, Tybalt even ends up fighting
me and Romeo at the same time! There’s mayhem – it’s not just a
duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, others get involved too: it
affects everybody. So the audience won’t know when the famous death
is going to come.

Then, there is the famous moment when Mercutio has been fatally
wounded and he is on the point of death. Tybalt knows exactly what
he has done, but Benvolio and Romeo don’t know what’s wrong. You
need to play that in a particular way so that it’s clear for the
audience but everyone else has somehow missed it. It’s an
interesting one to try to piece together.

Mercutio’s Death: His Final Words

Last week, I talked about the Queen Mab speech, and how so much
of it lived up in the echelons with the spirits. This dynamic
reappears particularly in his final speeches, where Mercutio is
desperate not to let anyone see that he’s injured. In these final
speeches, he keeps getting up there for just a second – he is
determined to leave this earth, and arrive at the upper levels –
but then he gets dragged back down, by the fact that his injury is
so severe. So that was a nice discovery, even if I abandon it later
on. For now, I might play around with all the lines that I think
are earth-bound and emotive, really giving those some weight and
then, by contrast, really swinging all of the imaginative lines
upwards. If you set yourself explorations like that, you can
discard as much or as little as you want. But it’s nice to fully
investigate something and then tweak it along the way.

I was struggling with the “plague both your houses” section
after the fight, where I die because it’s quite a disjointed
section of speech. Obviously he is at the point of death so his
imagery and his language are jumping to and fro. But because we
rehearsed the fight separately, we also had this difficulty when we
were rehearsing that scene that we would cut to the end of the
fight, and I had to pick up that emotional journey out of nothing –
I felt like a bit of a fake. I was struggling with that so I took
it in to discuss with Jan.

We just went through it and talked a bit about why the language
is shaped as it is in his final speeches. I showed Jan where the
injury was, which was the lower part of my torso on the left hand
side, and Jan said “Oh, that would have gone through the diaphragm”
… of course! So she actually did a little drawing of what this
wound would have done to him, and we had a very morbid conversation
about what’s happening internally: how it would have pierced the
diaphragm (which is where all the breathing power comes from), and
how it would have punctured the lung, so he eventually dies from
suffocation as his lung is filling up with blood. We talked about
the physical logistics and how that would be affecting voice and
breath and sound.

I used that information alongside my idea that Mercutio enters
the imaginary zone for a few seconds, gets a little taste of
something clever and witty that he wants to leave the world with
and then he gets dragged back down by the pain of the injuries.

I made another discovery with Jan. One of the final lines
Mercutio says as he is leaving the stage is “A pox on both your
houses” (3.1.108). My natural instinct, and the way I’ve seen it
done a lot, is that it comes up like a victory; he screams at the
houses, venomous. But actually, thinking about this imaginary world
that Mercutio can enter, I thought it would be far more ominous if
by that point in the speech he has almost given up on his injury,
he has almost entered this other, Queen Mab realm. In his brain,
he’s up with the souls in the upper architecture of the Globe. So
“A pox on your houses” is far more effective if it’s given by
someone who has left this earth; it’s matter-of-fact, almost as if
he has seen it somewhere. He is so close to death that he has given
up fighting about it; he has fought and fought and then there is a
moment of release, when we see him exist in the place where he
always wanted to be, which was away from the earth and up with the
spirits in the imagination.

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the
part as he goes through the rehearsal process - they are simply his
own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsals
progress.

This is the third bulletin from Mercutio (Phil Cumbus). It
covers Phil's second week of rehearsals, his work on voice and the
Queen Mab speech, fight direction and getting the play on its feet
- all very vocal and active!

Getting the play on its feet

The second week was a transition point: taking what we have
discovered in that first week from around the table session, and
bringing it to the floor. It’s a natural transition, where you move
from thinking about just the words, to thinking about entrances and
exits and blocking, and things like that. But it’s also the biggest
change and so can be difficult; it’s the first time you have to
move as the character, the first time you actually interact with
the other characters in the setting of the play, as opposed to
round the table, and the first time that you are speaking the lines
within a situation, in a world. So it is the most unstable time in
the whole process, because whatever brilliant ideas I have in my
head about what I can do with Mercutio, trying to manifest them is
much more difficult and scary than you imagine. You’re trying to
discover the character, but in front of everybody else, so that
transition point is a tough moment, in any rehearsal period.

Voice Work

When we aren’t in a scene, there’s the chance to have one-on-one
classes with the various experts in movement, voice and text at the
Globe. This week, I had a session with the voice coach Jan [Haydn
Rowles], who is a brilliant, brilliant woman. She’s an amazing
dialect coach for accent work, and we’ve worked on a few
productions in the past together. But she’s also amazingly
well-informed about the way language affects behaviour and the
psychology of how our brains work; she’s studying neuro-linguistic
behaviour. I went in there thinking I was going to have a voice
session – in terms of vowel sounds and projection and resonance and
technique – and actually, we ended up talking about character,
about what I think Mercutio needs and what I think Dominic
[Dromgoole, the director] wants from him. So it’s not just a case
of coming at those questions from the point of view of technique,
but connecting that to how he behaves and moves, which then affect
his voice.

We were also thinking about where people look when they talk to
you. She was explaining the idea that if someone is trying to talk
about emotion or if they’re lying, they often look at the ground
and maybe shuffle a little bit, especially if it’s something they
can’t deal with; whereas when giving facts, or honest feelings, or
directions, people are more likely to look up at a middle
level.

Interestingly, the architecture of the Globe works in a similar
way with different associations at each level. From the stage, you
look down to the yard below, which, in Renaissance hierarchy, would
have been thought of as the belly. The middle gallery is dead ahead
of you, which is the brain, and then there is the upper gallery
above. Jan talked about how that upper level is the far more
imaginative zone, the spirit, which obviously Mercutio operates in
most of the time. So Jan and I began thinking about those three
levels in relation to Mercutio’s scenes, and we’ve started work on
the Queen Mab speech, and thinking about which parts of the theatre
his lines are hitting at different points, at what point does he
lose the thread of it, and tying that into the Globe space
specifically.

The Queen Mab speech

The Queen Mab speech is such a profound moment, a little bubble
that seemingly comes out of nowhere, and it is filled with such
amazing language. But because it’s not driven by the narrative,
it’s not clear how Mercutio feels about it; you enter into it with
so many possibilities that the directions you can take Queen Mab in
are pretty much endless. So you need to make a choice, which is
what I am confronted with in this period of rehearsals … which is
as exciting as it is daunting!

The way I think I’m going to play this speech is using the idea
that it starts out as a game, a riff. Mercutio enjoys language like
a jazz player; he’s a free-flowing beat-poet, and he’s unleashed
this speech to entertain everybody, including himself. But then at
some point in the speech, it becomes devoid of Romeo and Benvolio;
he leaves them, and enters his own imagination so much that he gets
lost in it. But then, Queen Mab eventually descends after the joy
of this universe and the imagery he has created; he could continue
to talk about Queen Mab for hours if he wanted to – he’s got that
much imagination – but something else happens that stops him. And
what I think happens is he realises he’s talking about himself.
More and more, I’m coming to the conclusion that when Mercutio is
talking about other people or other things, often he’s really
talking about himself. For example, there’s a moment where he’s
talking to Benvolio about quarrelling, saying:

Thou art like one of those fellows that, when he
enters
the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword
upon the table and says 'God send me no need of thee!’,
and by the operation of the second cup draws
him on the drawer, when indeed there is no need. 3.1.5-9

But Benvolio is not like that at all; Mercutio is. So it’s like
he directs energy at other things or other people because he
doesn’t have the capability of being honest. And I think Queen Mab
is about that. He’s this guy who’s good at being imaginative and
witty and funny and being entertaining to other people but there’s
nothing else to it, and during the course of the speech, he
realises the pointlessness of it. Although he starts by describing
Mab – “she is like this, she is like this” – there’s a moment where
the language changes and he starts describing everything with male
pronouns. This whole speech has become about him, and he starts to
descend, because he realises he has nothing to give other than the
fact that he has fun, sleeps around, but there’s no love – just,
sex, sex, sex. He’s so lost because he’s got nothing else. He
realises this, and having bared his soul in front of his friends,
it cuts him half. He descends from being at the peak of his talent
at the top of the speech, to the very depth of his depression by
the end.

Typically what happens with the end of the Queen Mab speech is
that it builds and builds and gets more energy and more frenetic,
and Romeo has to come in and say “Peace, peace, Mercutio” to cut
him off. But what I’m trying to do is play it that so that Mercutio
stops himself, that he just loses faith and he sees the
pointlessness of everything. After this amazing journey of Queen
Mab, he stops dead, because he’s lost and he’s got nothing and he’s
depressed and he’s losing his friends. So I’ve been trying to think
about it in those kind of terms … but who know what it’ll end up
like? It could be completely different!

Fight Rehearsals

Pretty much every single day so far we’ve been rehearsing the
fighting. Fight rehearsals are like the choreography for dance, but
obviously it has to build up to become a believable violent act. In
order to do that, you have to learn them quite early on and bit by
bit you build it up over the course of weeks, so that by the time
we open the show, it will be ready.

In terms of the rehearsals, Malcolm [Ranson, fight director]
knows the story and knows the characters, but doesn’t know us as
actors, so he waits to see how we move as people and then creates a
fight organically out of that to match us. So in the duel between
Mercutio and Tybalt, we’ve worked out lots of touches that work
with the characters. Tybalt is mocked by me all the way through the
play for his fighting. Although he has a reputation as a fighter,
he’s part of this new Italian school of fighting based in Saviolo’s
teachings, which Mercutio hates, because he hates anything that is
new. (He has this amazing contradiction, one of his many
contradictions, that he’s got such a free way of thinking, such a
free imagination and untainted unbound spirit, but yet at the same
time he just wants everything to stay the same and hates that
people are always looking to speak differently and talk differently
and fight differently). So there’s a moment where I begin the
fight, mocking his moves, and instead of fighting with the swords,
I immediately land him with a huge punch with the hilt of the
sword, completely changing the rules. This forces Tybalt to grab
his dagger so that he’s now fighting with a rapier and a
dagger.

The obvious thing to do on my part would be to grab my dagger
too, but I thought that it would be better if I deliberately chose
not to get my dagger. As Mercutio, I think I can take Tybalt with
just my sword, whereas he needs another dagger. So we have one
phrase of fighting like that, and it all goes disastrously wrong of
course, because Mercutio is like that – he almost gets killed, and
Benvolio is running round trying to give me the dagger. And
eventually, after I almost get my head chopped off, I grab the
dagger and the fight continues.

So it’s great; again, as with the choreography, it’s finding
character and discovering things through the alternative means of
voice and dance and fighting. And we’re having a great time. And
getting paid to swing swords round and fight!

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the
part as he goes through the rehearsal process - they are simply his
own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsals
progress.

Obviously a good place to start with Shakespeare is figuring out
what exactly what all the lines mean; I need to know exactly what
I’m saying to other people, and similarly, I need to know exactly
what is being said to me. So, we worked through every single scene
we were in, awkwardly paraphrasing what we're saying into modern
English. And with Mercutio that has been particularly fun as he is
the most filthy-minded individual I have ever come across! Almost
every single line of his will contain some kind of sexual innuendo
or reference to a bodily part. He's thrusting these sexual words
everywhere, because that's his vocabulary, which means that I have
had to sit in a room in front of people and then in a very dry
academic tone talk about sexual organs and the like while trying to
seem professional; so it’s been very difficult and induced lots of
giggles.

But this process naturally opens up questions about who these
people are, what their relationships are relationship like, and why
they talk the way they do. So you start to enter into a dialogue
about character and relationship which is useful. He's working on
an opposite tangent to someone like Romeo who is full of lyricism
and poetry and Petrarchan beauty and Mercutio is kind of a sexual
antidote to all of that.

Developing the Character of Mercutio

Mercutio is an amazing character but one that's quite difficult
to find a starting point for. Obviously, there are all these
extremes in your head when you approach the part of Mercutio (any
part in fact), and actually, the process of the first week of
rehearsal is trying not to leap onto anything that you haven't
discovered in the text; I have to begin by stripping it all back to
the basics, which is asking questions like: How old is he? What's
his background like? Why is he the way he is? It’s a case of going
back to those and working out the foundations from which you can
then build up a character. Otherwise you'll end up with something
that is not based on truth and not based on Shakespeare, which is
what we as actors are here to do – to tell the story to the
audience as best we can.

So far, he seems to be slightly self-loathing and uncomfortable
in his own skin, and yet at the same time extraordinarily
comfortable. It’s an amazing contradiction going on at the very
heart of him which seems to me why he's so torn; there's that push
and pull that's going on inside of his brain, and which runs
through his amazing imagery and his fantastic imagination.

As a result, I really want the audience, as well as Benvolio and
Romeo, to really hate Mercutio at certain times. He’s one of those
people that every social group tends to have who can be the life
and soul of whatever room they happen to be in, and yet can also be
completely obnoxious so that you would hate to hang out with them
if they were in a particular mood. He’s both: he comes and goes;
he’s hot and cold; he’s not just the young joker who runs around –
he’s got a negative side to himself as well.

Key Relationships

The trio of Benvolio, Romeo and Mercutio is really strong. We’ve
talked about their history and why they hang out with each other
and what it is they each bring to the trio that makes it a good
friendship. With Mercutio, I think that he’s older than the other
two – they are possibly nine or ten years younger than him – and
he’s been in this town longer than them and that in some ways it’s
‘his’ gang. But the beautiful thing about this play is that it
takes place at a time when those things are breaking up, at a time
when Romeo is growing up and has a desire to fall in love and break
away from them a little. And Mercutio clearly has deep, deep
feelings for Romeo which he is simultaneously trying to protect and
battle against. He’s trying to compensate for the fact that he is
losing him, which leads later on to the duel and is partly the
reason why he fights Tybalt instead of Romeo.

I think there is so much back story to these three friends which
we are never told, and you have to imagine the ways that they came
together, what sort of circumstances led them to be friends. They
seem to work best as the three, when one of them is not there; they
are always looking for the other one. There’s a scene which
Shakespeare writes beautifully where Benvolio and Mercutio are on
their own and then Romeo arrives and the three touch base again;
they riff and have a series of witty exchanges which reminds
Mercutio of how things were, when he says, “Now art thou sociable,
now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art” (2.4.89-90) – you
get a little flash of his real feeling and his strong love for
Romeo. But then, he has to counteract it himself by launching into
some bawdy imagery to let us know, and to reassure himself that
he’s not gay. And so that intimacy with Romeo changes when the
Nurse enters.

Mercutio and Women

Mercutio’s scene with the Nurse is the only moment in the whole
play when you get to see him with a woman, despite all his sexual
language. There is a lot of wit in the exchange, and typically, the
three boys ridicule, but I wanted to do something a bit stronger.
There’s a moment when I make up this song about whores and money,
and I had the idea that I really wanted to dominate the Nurse, that
as soon as a woman enters this world, Mercutio launches himself
into quite a misogynistic place, thrusting her up against one of
the pillars because he can. He’s in great position of power – he is
of noble birth, he’s rich, he can do whatever he wants – and so we
get a little taste of what Mercutio is like with women, which is
violent and disrespectful. I plant a huge kiss on her, which she
doesn’t want, and then I leave.

If we set that up, that whole scene becomes terribly
embarrassing for Romeo. Mercutio is aware of having done wrong, and
it is this which helps to fuel the next scene where we see them all
together, which is when Mercutio fights in Romeo’s place against
Tyablt and dies. It’s trying to piece the scenes together and give
them a cycle or a journey that makes sense.

Dancing – the Masked Ball

On the very first or second day, we had an initial dance
rehearsal, which was a great icebreaker, jigging around and thigh
slapping, and all that! Not only does every show at the Globe have
a jig at the end (which is my favorite bit by far!), but also in
Romeo and Juliet there’s the big party scene in the
middle, so we’ve started choreographing some ideas for it. And
what’s been nice is that as soon as you start to choreograph a
dance, what immediately comes out is everyone thinking about the
character, so you have an amazing dynamic where you not only work
out the logistics of steps and staging, but also try to fill every
move with story.

For example, I ended up without a partner on this particular day
we were rehearsing the masked ball scene, so I thought that instead
of staying in couples, Mercutio would dance round everybody else,
checking some people out, being rude to others. And then I spotted
Tybalt dancing very elegantly with Lady Capulet; obviously,
Mercutio and Tybalt loathe each other, so I decided that Mercutio
would just come in and steal Lady Capulet away! So I find combining
the brilliant choreography to character work is great. Everything
feeds into the world you are creating. Masked balls are part of
what these people did. The party scene isn’t just a contrivance to
move the story on; they are a reality in Verona for these young
men, for the Nurse, for the parents – it’s all just part of their
world and making believable is as fun as learning the steps.

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the
part as he goes through the rehearsal process - they are simply his
own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsals
progress.

I was very lucky in that I grew up in the Cotswolds, in a little
village in Oxfordshire, and so from an early age, my mum (who is a
great English and drama teacher) would drive me to Stratford to see
Shakespeare's plays at the RSC. Usually on the way she'd give me a
précis of the story so that I'd have a clue of what was going on …
and usually I'd watch them and still be pretty clueless! But I saw
some great performances there and had a real taste of the
excitement of seeing how performance could affect an audience.

I went to a stage school, so it was quite limited in terms of an
academic or theoretical study, which is what most people tend to
have at school. But we did do quite a lot of practical work on the
plays. And then I went to RADA, which describes itself as a
classical training, and there I worked on various speeches as well
as playing Richard III in an in-house project at the end
of my first year, which was great fun. So even though my experience
of Shakespeare was quite varied, I suppose my background has always
been one of performing it and accessing it from an acting point of
view, rather than a textual study.

Saying that, I only really experienced performing Shakespeare to
a public audience when I came to the Globe in 2007 and played
Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. The brilliant support
and inspiration from this building and the people in it, coupled
with performing it in that arena, was something I'll never forget
and taught me in an instant, I think, more than I could have
possibly learnt from or about Shakespeare from years of study.

Preparation before rehearsals

I always do a similar process before rehearsals with whatever I
work on, Shakespeare or not. I like to arrive having some ideas of
the character, knowing a lot about the background to the play and
enough of the social history to feel secure.

But I don't like to do too much; I find I do more harm than good
if I work too much before the rehearsal period! I like to enter
into those first few days, and those first few times of running
through a scene and interacting with other characters, by just
allowing that to be the moment where I go, “Ah, OK … maybe that's
how that feels, or maybe that scene could take Mercutio down that
road”. It makes it feel more like you are part of an active bit of
storytelling, as opposed to arriving with something that you have
rehearsed in your bedroom. Until I've met everybody and interacted
and found out what Benvolio is like and what Romeo is like and what
the world of the play is going to be like, I don't like to make too
many decisions.

Having been on the stage before, it’s nice to know what its
possibilities are this time round, especially playing a part like
Mercutio, which has such scope to connect with the audience. But
it's such an immediate space, you can't really prepare for it too
much before you are on. Even over the run of three or four months
during The Merchant of Venice, it never ever became
regular. Every single time going on that stage I was terrified, and
stuff would change every single performance. So I imagine that the
process of learning about how the space works and how the audience
becomes so much a part of a show will be as terrifying and as
interesting as it was the first time.

Initial impressions of Mercutio

In some ways, it’s quite intimidating to be playing Mercutio, as
most people who come to see this show will have a frame of
reference for the play. And I have my own preconceptions about
Mercutio: fiery; ephemeral; mercurial; party going; frenetic; a
slightly subversive character who spices things up and acts as a
catalyst to violence and sex and laughter; the whirlwind at the
heart of the play. Certainly that is how I imagine it, my idea of
him.

But even so, it’s amazing how the reality of the play can differ
from what anybody's preconceptions about it are, or what they
imagine it to be like. So actually seeing the whole thing performed
might not actually be what people had imagined, or what everyone
associates with Romeo and Juliet.

First day of rehearsals

The first day is quite possibly the most terrifying bit of the
whole job! If you can imagine a room full of the most nervous
people from all different aspects of the production, that’s what
it’s like. Everyone hides it very well, but you’re worried about
who you are going to be working with and if you are going to get on
well with the people that you need to get on well with; it’s quite
an intense, but very friendly atmosphere.

So we met, and had a cup of coffee and a biscuit and I tried to
figure out who everybody was. What they do so well at the Globe is
that they introduce you to the building and to all the different
departments, so that everyone seems connected to the productions;
everyone is meeting to help create the home that we are going to be
in for the next few weeks and months.

After that, we descended on a room and did a read through. You
are always told that you don't need to give a performance, that
it's just about hearing the play once. And I've watched some
amazing actors who are so confident and at ease with what they are
going to develop over the next weeks, that they just read the lines
out, playing it straight and not committing on anything. And I
always think that's what I should do, and every single time I end
up vomiting out a performance – I just can't help it! You get so
excited and so nervous; you just want everyone to know that you are
capable of something so you try to show off how much energy you
have and how loud you can be, which is completely unnecessary. But
I do love the read through, as it means you hear the play and hear
everybody's voices saying those beautiful words for the first time.
It's a mixture of brilliant excitement and terror and sweat.

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the
part as he goes through the rehearsal process - they are simply his
own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsals
progress.